Nuclear fusion is booming (in a good way)

The nuclear future for zoomers will look different than it did for boomers.

Older generations were born into a world of nuclear fission, a form of nuclear energy that creates power by splitting atoms, releases radioactive waste, and is fueled by non-renewable sources like uranium and plutonium. But 80 years later, the US is on the precipice of energy generation from nuclear fusion, the other type of nuclear energy.

Fusion creates power by fusing two atoms into one, making the result larger than the sum of its parts. The process is fueled by tritium and deuterium, a hydrogen isotope found in seawater, and creates more energy than nuclear fission. Fusion also creates less radiation and can’t lead to a nuclear meltdown like the fission catastrophes that occurred at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine) or Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.

Why now

So why didn’t the US generate power from this safer, renewable form of nuclear energy in the first place? Because fusion technology wasn’t advanced enough to produce reliable results until recently. Now, nuclear fusion companies are urging the federal government to help this technology scale as fast as possible to make sure the US takes advantage of what could be a multitrillion-dollar market.

“As we continue to scale, it’s the beginning of a chapter where fusion is starting to be able to replace fission,” Greg Piefer, CEO of nuclear fusion company Shine Technologies, told Tech Brew.

“China is absolutely investing much more than the US government in fusion. So we do need to make sure that we don’t lose that race,” he added.

The technological advances that have helped fusion pivot from existing solely in the scientific world to being commercially viable vary from company to company. For Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Massachusetts-based nuclear fusion company, those advances include building a smaller version of a tokamak—a machine that uses magnets to create fusion energy—to make it economically competitive with other forms of energy.

Jennifer Ganten, Commonwealth’s chief global affairs officer, told Tech Brew that once the company was able to derisk its technology, the money followed.

“Capital markets have recognized [fusion’s technological advances] and they see the tremendous upside of what could be a trillion-dollar industry supplying clean, firm baseload power that doesn’t have to be reliant on natural resources,” Ganten said. “Fusion is not an ‘if.’ It’s turning into a ‘when.’”

According to PitchBook, 129 fusion startups have collectively raised almost $14 billion in venture capital investments to date, and this year has been fusion’s most prosperous: There have been 47 fusion deals thus far in 2025, with more than $4 billion invested, sailing past even the booming VC year of 2021, when investors poured just over $3 billion into 31 startups in the space.

Power plants

The current Trump administration has also floated fusion as an answer to the country’s AI energy demand problem. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building one of the world’s first nuclear fusion power plants in Virginia, which has one of the highest densities of data centers. Ganten said the company plans to break ground on the site, which is a lease with Dominion Energy, in 2028.

“We did a joint development agreement with them that is not a financial transaction, but more a knowledge transfer transaction,” she said. “Teach us how to put power in the grid and be a power plant, and they learn a lot about fusion in the meantime.”

Helion, a nuclear fusion company based in Washington, is also building one of the world’s first fusion power plants. Helion uses deuterium and helium-3 as fuel and creates fusion in “very short pulses” repeatedly, rather through a sustained effort over an extended period of time, Helion VP of Public Affairs Jackie Siebens told Tech Brew. The company broke ground on its power plant in Washington over the summer.

“We’re involved in conversations about the massive [energy] demand from things like AI and data centers and all that, but also our vision is to bring reliable, affordable, clean energy to the world,” Siebens said. “We envision driving the cost of clean electricity down, far below what most people thought was possible.”

Policy support

In order for fusion to help meet some US energy demand, it needs to be scaled up domestically, Siebens said. But at the moment, Helion is “overly dependent” on China for many of its material needs.

There are “many vendors here in the US that we are hoping to see scale up production so that as we deploy our first plant, we turn ‘first of a kind’ into ‘first of many,’” Siebens said. “But at the end of the day, they have to be incentivized to scale up that production.”

That’s why she’s “thrilled” about the possibility of fusion components being eligible for the 45X Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit via the Fusion Advanced Manufacturing Parity Act, bipartisan legislation introduced in the House of Representatives last month.

“We just don’t want to end up in a situation where we invent here [but] we don’t scale it here,” Siebens said. “Whoever actually leads in scaling this technology is going to have the strategic advantage of the century. And we want to make sure we don’t miss out on that.”